Tuesday, August 01, 2006

Slow news day in Seanachie's designer monastic cell in a secret location on the corner of rue du Chemin Vert and avenue Parmentier. I am currently trying to engineer a day-trip out of Paris for tomorrow for my parents and me. The Normandy beaches are out of the frame because of their relative inaccessability in one day and Reims, home to the famous Gothic cathedral and the world's most famous and erroneously over-rated sparking wine, was a rip-off courtesy of SNCF (€133 return for a four-hour round trip!). Now I am trying to find the name of that charming inland port on the Seine, in Normandy that I've heard do much about. I thought it was Gonflans-Ste-Honorine but that particular town seems to not want to advertise its charms too openly on the Internet. I suppose I could ask a friend...

I found out courtesy of my father that the word 'craic' (as in what Irish people have when they're not terminally depressed) is a genuine Irish (i.e. Gaelic) word. I thought it was a made-up 1980s expression that came along about the same time that trendy young Irish people starting telling people to "póg mo thóin" (sic). But apparently it comes from old Donegal Irish, in those pre-Gaeilge caighdeánaithe days it was craich, and it meant 'plunder', which is what the O'Donnell's and co used to do on their medieval pleasure trips into Sligo and beyond. Considering that they probably helped themselves to some rape and pillage as well as harmless old cattle-rustling, the origins of this already-overused word are beginning to perturb me.